Okay leftypolcels, despite everything Caleb says about folk being American proletarian music, it was really blacks who invented American music as we know it. What was American music before jazz and the blues? Jazz is America's greatest contribution to high art, and without the blues there would be no rock and roll. As Abel Ferrara said about Jimmy Page, "Oh, yeah. I'll strangle that cocksucker Jimmy Page. As if every fucking lick that guy ever played didn't come off a Robert Johnson album." And then there's hip-hop and pop which are the two most recognizable American music genres worldwide. Hip hop is the music of the black urban proletariat, and modern pop evolved out of Motown.
<After graduating from high school in Cincinnati, you moved to New York to study music composition at the Juilliard School of Music. In retrospect, how important do you consider this classical education for your work as an artist?
>After graduating from high school, I had two career paths. I had been studying architecture for the last four years in high school, but I also studied music from the age of 7 until I graduated. I was enrolled in Ohio State but then decided to audition for Juilliard. Since I had been studying music longer, I decided to study music composition at Juilliard. I believe my classical music education has been essential in formulating my own style of composition.
>That was the beginning of my songwriting training. I was studying Beethoven, Brahms, Bach and those guys. Debussy was a huge influence on me, and even some of the Isley Brothers songs, is kind of reminiscent of Debussy like “Highways of My Life,” “Lover's Eve,” or “Love Put Me on the Corner.” George Gershwin was another one; his chord structures were a little different, and I liked that. Gershwin was a student of that same Romantic period. I used a lot of those harmonies and chords on Isley Brothers material, Isley-Jasper-Isley and my current work.
<Chris, your musical expertise is considered the foundation of the legendary “Isley Brothers Sound” of the golden years. How would you characterize this sound?
>Basically, the sound is a combination of jazz and classical harmonies, particularly in how I form my chord structures. They consist of degrees of the scale and formation of chords not normally used in R&B music. The combination produced a unique sound. I wanted people to be able to recognize that sound as soon as they heard the song, much like Motown had a particularly recognizable sound. I have maintained that sound in my solo projects and people still tell me that they recognize my work by the sound of the song as soon as it comes on.
OH MY GERD! HE STOLE THE CHORDS
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quincy_Jones<In 1957, he moved to Paris, where he studied composition and theory with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen and performed at the Paris Olympia.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadia_Boulanger>From a musical family, she achieved early honours as a student at the Conservatoire de Paris but, believing that she had no particular talent as a composer, she gave up writing music and became a teacher. In that capacity, she influenced generations of young composers, especially those from the United States and other English-speaking countries. Among her students were many important composers, soloists, arrangers, and conductors, including Grażyna Bacewicz, Daniel Barenboim, Lennox Berkeley, İdil Biret, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, John Eliot Gardiner, Philip Glass, Roy Harris, Quincy Jones, Dinu Lipatti, Igor Markevitch, Julia Perry, Astor Piazzolla,[2] Laurence Rosenthal,[3] Virgil Thomson, and George Walker.[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_Messiaen>Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire at age 11 and studied with Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré, among others. He was appointed organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, in 1931, a post he held for 61 years, until his death. He taught at the Schola Cantorum de Paris during the 1930s. After the fall of France in 1940, Messiaen was interned for nine months in the German prisoner of war camp Stalag VIII-A, where he composed his Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) for the four instruments available in the prison—piano, violin, cello and clarinet. The piece was first performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners for an audience of inmates and prison guards.[5] Soon after his release in 1941, Messiaen was appointed professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1966, he was appointed professor of composition there, and he held both positions until retiring in 1978. His many distinguished pupils included Iannis Xenakis, George Benjamin, Alexander Goehr, Pierre Boulez, Jacques Hétu, Tristan Murail, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Kurtág, and Yvonne Loriod, who became his second wife. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebony_Concerto_(Stravinsky)>Stravinsky's engagement with jazz dates back to the closing years of the First World War, the major jazz-inspired works of that period being L'histoire du soldat, the Ragtime for eleven instruments, and the Piano-Rag-Music. Although traces of jazz elements, especially blues and boogie-woogie, can be found in his music throughout the 1920s and 1930s, it was only with the Ebony Concerto that Stravinsky once again incorporated features of jazz into a composition on a far-reaching scale.[2] The title was originally suggested to Stravinsky by Aaron Goldmark, of Leeds Music Corporation, who had negotiated the commission and suggested the form it should take.[3] The composer explained that his title does not refer to the clarinet, as might be supposed, but rather to Africa, because "the jazz performers I most admired at that time were Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, and the guitarist Charles Christian. And blues meant African culture to me."[4]
>Herman found the solo part frighteningly difficult, and did not feel that Stravinsky had really adapted his writing to the jazz-band idiom. Instead, he "wrote pure Stravinsky", and the band did not feel at all comfortable with the score initially. "After the very first rehearsal, at which we were all so embarrassed we were nearly crying because nobody could read, he walked over and put his arm around me and said, 'Ah, what a beautiful family you have.'"[9]
>On November 4, 1945, while still in the midst of composing the concerto, Stravinsky wrote a letter to Nadia Boulanger describing his progress as well as plans to make a recording with the Herman band in February 1946. This recording session was ultimately postponed but, at that time, Stravinsky foresaw its release on a 78-rpm disc, with the first two movements on one side and the theme and variations on the other. He expected the durations of the three movements to be just two-and-a-half, two, and three minutes.[10]
>On 19 August 1946, the day after performing the piece together on a "Columbia Workshop" national broadcast, Herman and Stravinsky recorded the concerto in Hollywood, California.[12] Stravinsky felt that the jazz musicians would have a hard time with the various time signatures, as this was more than a decade before Dave Brubeck started using unusual time signatures in jazz performance and virtually all jazz was played in 44.[13] Saxophonist Flip Phillips said that "during the rehearsal […] there was a passage I had to play there and I was playing it soft, and Stravinsky said, 'Play it, here I am!' and I blew it louder and he threw me a kiss!'"[14] In the late 1950s Herman made a second recording, in stereo, in the Belock Recording Studio at Bayside New York,[15] calling it a "very delicate and a very sad piece".[
https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/herbie-hancock-interviewed/<Clearly, you must have started young. Was getting a proper music education important?>I had been playing music since I was seven. I played classical music but also listened to rhythm and blues because I lived in a black neighbourhood so that was the music that was happening there. And I’m from Chicago so I heard the real blues, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and a bunch of others.
<At just 11 you performed Mozart with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Tell me about your classical music teachers.>The first one [Mrs Whalum] taught me to read, I could read pretty good, but there was no feeling. The second one [Mrs Jordan] was about feel and she taught me how to play Chopin and Debussy and things that are more sensitive.
<You mentioned earlier another defining moment, joining Miles. What impact did Birth Of The Cool have on you?>Oh man. I had never heard anything like that before. It fascinated me because here we have a mixture of instruments that were traditionally classical instruments and jazz instruments, and I loved the sound of them. But what really did it for me was when I heard the first record of Miles Davis with Gil Evans, Miles Ahead [1957]. When Miles Ahead first came out, I cried because it was so beautiful. Even to this day I can’t help but well up inside listening to it. Only two records did that for me, Miles Ahead and Stravinsky’s Rite Of Spring. Either one of them, I well up. They both touch me deeply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_White>White was born Barry Eugene Carter on September 12, 1944, in Galveston, Texas.[3][4] His father was Melvin A. White, and his mother was Sadie Marie Carter. Unbeknownst to his mother, his father was already married to another woman, so she gave him her last name. However, upon seeing her last name of Carter on his son's birth certificate, Melvin scratched Carter out and wrote his own last name of White.[5][6] He grew up in the Watts neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles, California.[7] He was the older of two children; his brother Darryl was 13 months younger. White grew up listening to his mother's classical music collection and first took to the piano, emulating what he heard on the records.
<With your orchestral approach, there’s a classical influence in your music too.>Absolutely.
<Where did you get that exposure growing up in a black neighborhood [South Central] in L.A.?>I was very rare in my neighborhood [laughs], let me put it that way. My mother exposed me to classical music. My brother couldn't stand it, but I could sit there with her for hours and listen to those beautiful melodies and arrangements. Believe me, she had some classical record collection. https://patricerushen.com/full-length-biohttps://patricerushen.com/symphonicworks>Multi-Grammy nominated artist, Patrice Rushen, is fashioning her career after the legacy of her long-time friend and mentor, Quincy Jones. Composer…Producer…International Recording Artist…Rushen has definitely earned the respect she has been awarded by her peers in the music industry.
>Admired by many for her groundbreaking achievements, Rushen has amassed an impressive list of “firsts”. She was the first woman to serve as Musical Director for the 46th, 47th & 48th Annual Grammy Awards, the first woman in 43 years to serve as Head Composer/Musical Director for television’s highest honor, the Emmy Awards and the first woman Musical Director of the NAACP Image Awards, an honor she held for 12 consecutive years. Rushen has also been the only woman Musical Director/Composer for the Peoples Choice Awards and HBO’s Comic Relief. She was the only woman Musical Director/Conductor/Arranger for a late-night television talk show. The show was The Midnight Hour, which aired on CBS. In addition, Rushen was named the Musical Director/Composer for Newsweek’s first American Achievement Awards, broadcast from the Kennedy Center and she served as the Musical Director for Janet Jackson’s World Tour, “janet.” As the Musical Director for the award shows, she composed and performed special musical tributes to Michael Landon, Ted Turner, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, The Temptations, James Garner and Leonard Bernstein to name a few. Rushen was named Composer in Residence during the August 2004 sessions at the Henry Mancini Institute.
>A classically trained pianist, Rushen has spent a lifetime honing the skills that make her one of the music industry’s most versatile and sought after artists. In 1998, she was again honored by the music industry when her adult contemporary CD, “Signature”, received a Grammy nomination. The CD also received an NAACP Image Award nomination and also landed in the top ten of the adult contemporary jazz charts. The critically lauded, chart topping style she championed in the 70’s and 80’s — a jazz/R&B/pop fusion that combines melodic accessibility with instrumental prowess. This not only became her signature style, but also has continued to be a mainstay of popular radio.
>In addition to her success as a recording artist and musical director, Rushen is also an accomplished composer providing musical scores for Emmy-nominated television movies and series among which include Showtime’s “The Killing Yard” starring Alan Alda and directed by Euzhan Palcy; “Just A Dream”, Danny Glover’s directorial debut; the Sundance Film Award winning “Our America”, directed by Ernest Dickerson; “Fire and Ice” starring Kadeem Hardison for the BET Network; HBO’s “America’s Dream”, starring Danny Glover and Wesley Snipes; the critically acclaimed Wonderful World of Disney telefilm, “Ruby Bridges”; Masterpiece Theater’s “Cora Unashamed” starring Regina Taylor and C.C.H. Pounder; “Brewster Place” starring Oprah Winfrey; the PBS documentary, “A. Phillip Randolph” and Lifetime’s “For One Night” starring Raven-Symone. Rushen also composed the theme song for the hit TV sitcom, “The Steve Harvey Show.”https://patricerushen.com/symphonicworks<collection of her orchestral compositions on that page>One of my dreams has always been to compose for orchestra. The richness and multi colors of the orchestra’s sound has always been attractive to me.
>A dear friend and colleague Dr. Bill Banfield, encouraged me to continue to develop this and other parts of my “musical voice and expression “ and to keep writing in this medium . In 1999 I composed my first symphony, SINFONIA . I just wanted to experiment with using every part of the orchestra. Up to that point, most of the ensembles I’d written for were smaller. I enjoyed that challenge and learned a lot, but I never thought I’d have the chance to work with a large orchestra … but it was my goal then.Since that time, I have had the blessing of being commissioned to write a few pieces, showcasing my compositions in the context of the Symphonic stage!!!
>I still have much to learn about this “instrument “, the orchestra, as the sounds and possibilities are as intriguing to me as ever. I wish to be as creative as possible with this wonderful “box of colors” to express the many sides of my musical interests. This too, is part of my journey. <It celebrates the love I have for what some would classify as “classical” music …and for me , it’s part of a large bouquet of flowers which can be arranged in any number of ways.
>These pieces are sonic landscapes with peaks and valleys , turns and twists and full of emotion. I intend to do more composing for orchestra as well as chamber groups and soloists for the concert stage, recital halls, etc. >The experimenting calls me to keep going, keep writing …. moving gradually towards revealing yet another way to use my “voice”.
>I hope you enjoy these pieces . >Patrice
<vidWatch this clip from the Oct. 21 rehearsal of Patrice Rushen's Color Express for Opening Night of our 75th Anniversary Season! >>14661Her compositions and arrangements on her early pop songs was insane too.
>Patrice Rushen – lead vocals (1-3, 5-7), backing vocals (1-7), electric piano (1-3, 5-7), synth solo (1), percussion (1, 3, 5-7), acoustic piano (2, 4, 5, 7, 8), drums (3, 6), tambourine (4, 8), clavinet (6); horn, string and vocal arrangements <I recommended Bill.
<“Is he white?” asked Miles.
<“Yeah,” I replied.
<“Does he wear glasses?”
<“Yeah.”
<“I know that motherfucker. I heard him at Birdland—he can play his ass off. Bring him over to the Colony in Brooklyn on Thursday night.”
<The club was in Bedford Stuyvesant, a neighborhood whites didn’t ordinarily enter. But George and Bill did, Bill sat in and got his white ass hired, and the classically-trained wimp became the pianist for the coolest jazz band in the world. Miles:
>When Bill Evans—we sometimes called him Moe—first got with the band, he was so quiet, man. One day, just to see what he could do, I told him [and you have to hear Miles’ raspy whisper to really appreciate this], “Bill, you know what you have to do, don’t you, to be in this band?”
>He looked at me all puzzled and shit and shook his head and said, “No, Miles, what do I have to do?”
>I said, “Bill, now you know we all brothers and shit and everybody’s in this thing together and so what I came up with for you is that you got to make it with everybody, you know what I mean? You got to fuck the band.” Now, I was kidding, but Bill was real serious, like Trane.
>He thought about it for about fifteen minutes and then came back and told me, “Miles, I thought about what you said and I just can’t do it, I just can’t do that. I’d like to please everyone and make everyone happy here, but I just can’t do that.”
>I looked at him and smiled and said, “My man!” And then he knew I was teasing.
<We're gonna run a train on you White boy!
>pls Miles no….
kek
>Bill brought a great knowledge of classical music, people like Rachmaninoff and Ravel. He was the one who told me to listen to the Italian pianist Arturo Michelangeli, so I did and fell in love with his playing. Bill had this quiet fire that I loved on piano. The way he approached it, the sound he got was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall. I had to change the way the band sounded again for Bill’s style by playing different tunes, softer ones at first. Bill played underneath the rhythm and I liked that, the way he played scales with the band. Red’s playing had carried the rhythm but Bill underplayed it and for what I was doing now with the modal thing, I liked what Bill was doing better.
>We just agreed on something and that's the way the album went
>We were just leaning to something, like Ravel
>I used to give him a lot of chords
>like five chords in one
>and I was like you can play either one
>I got it from Rachmaninoff, modulating from key to key
>Bill and I, Bartok
>Some of the things that caused Bill to leave the band hurt me, like that shit some black people put on him about being a white boy in our band. Many blacks felt that since I had the top small group in jazz and was paying the most money that I should have a black piano player. Now, I don’t go for that kind of shit; I have always wanted just the best players in my group and I don’t care about whether they’re black, white, blue, red or yellow. As long as they can play what I want that’s it. But I know this stuff got up under Bill’s skin and made him feel bad. Bill was a very sensitive person, it didn’t take much to set him off.”
>>14663https://www.allaboutjazz.com/bill-evans-on-meeting-miles-bill-evans-by-nenette-evans>In fact, Bill did mention that the last time before this meeting that he had seen Miles was when they were both nominated for a Grammy. So that would have been in 1968.
>Miles was nominated for Miles Smiles and Bill for Further Conversations with Myself. The actual winner that night was Cannonball Adderley Quintet for Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.
>That night, Bill said that Miles had stormed out in a huff. Grammy awards can be touchy affairs.
>In the late '70s, Bill said that Miles was currently holed-up in his New York apartment with the covered windows. This was (drug) code for a certain level of paranoia, I guess.
>Bill told me that when they got there with his lady friend, the first thing Miles said to him was about the woman he was with was "Who's the Jew-bitch?" I really don't know what else may have been said at that meeting or don't recall. Bill seemed very glad to have seen him, I gathered. <Bill was a very sensitive person, it didn’t take much to set him off.” - Miles Davis
>Miles was extremely cordial and happy to see us, I thought. I was surprised that his voice was so tiny; stature diminutive and skin desiccated, taut. To me, he appeared delicate, vulnerable. Whatever the mystique about Miles was, was lost on me, a non-jazz person per se.
>He liked me just as Bill said he would, whatever that meant. Bill always thought we'd be a good match. He said that on a number of occasions. After I had said one caustic thing or another, Bill would say, "You should meet Miles." I see the humor in that now.
>Bill Evans, saxophonist (a different peformer that played with Miles Davis with a coincidental name): "The only time it came up at all was not long after I joined Miles, the day Bill died. He (Miles) said, "What about him?" I said, "He died today." Miles went into a deep slump. He pulled out a piece of paper with Bill's phone number on it and said, 'Damn, I was supposed to call him this week,' and tore up the paper. Then someone called up from a newspaper and asked Miles for an interview about Bill. He just said, 'Why don't you do it with this Bill Evans?' and handed me the phone. That was a sad moment."
>Miles Davis, on his affection for Bill Evans piano - “ I used to call Bill up and tell him to take the phone off the hook: just leave it there and play for me.”